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Comment Depends on how you phrase the question .. (Score 1) 307

It's called push-polling depending on how the question was phrased .. A more relevant question would be - why does the government need to spy on its own people in order to protect then from the 'terrorists'?

"Overall, do you approve or disapprove of the government’s collection of telephone and internet data as part of anti-terrorism efforts?" Poll Data

"the use of leading questions to skew an opinion survey"

Comment Re:Not at a standstill, just no major features (Score 1) 288

@tlhIngan: "Oracle updated Vbox with a new release just 2 weeks ago"

@Phoronix: 'The v4.3 series has been receiving some maintenance updates during the last two years, but that's about it.'

"VirtualBox 4.3.20 (released 2014-11-21) | This is a maintenance release. The following items were fixed and/or added: ref

Submission + - Dear Slashdot, How do I engage 5th-8th graders in computing without going crazy? 1

An anonymous reader writes: Slashdot,

I volunteer at a inner-city community after school program focused K-8th grade. Right now, due to the volunteer demographic, we spend most of our activity time in arts and crafts and homework. The 5th-8th students are getting restless with the same activities. I've been asked to spice it up with some electrical wizardry. What I'd like to do is introduce the students to basic jobs skills through computers. My thoughts are that I could conduct some simple hands on experiments with circuits, maybe some bread boards, but ultimately, we're going to take apart a computer and put it back together. How successful this is, will dictate whether or not we will go into programming. However, whatever we do, I want the kids to obtain marketable skills. Anyone know of a curriculum I can follow? Past Wins and Lose Stories?

Comment Anonymous Ribbon Supporter said :) (Score 3, Insightful) 148

@Anonymous Ribbon Supporter: "This post was modded funny but I am not sure whether the poster was joking or not. The Slashdot groupthink mandates that everybody hate the ribbon interface, but you do realize that there are some people in the world who do not automagically subscribe to it, don't you?"

It's understandable why you would want to remain anonymous ..

Comment LibreOffice Writer a first look .. (Score 1) 148

@nine-times: 'One of my problems with LibreOffice (and OpenOffice, and some other FOSS apps) is that it doesn't fit with native UI conventions'

I've sat people down in front of LibreOffice Writer - and they can't tell the difference. LibreOffice-Writer (1) A First Look

Define 'native UI conventions' and give examples where the LibreOffice breaks them and if you're talking about the 'Office ribbon', then no one likes it, it makes simple tasks more complicated and is totally non-intuitive ...

Submission + - FSF endorsed Libreboot X200 laptop comes with Intel's AMT removed

gnujoshua writes: The Free Software Foundation has announced its endorsement of the Libreboot X200, a refurbished Lenovo ThinkPad X200 sold by Gluglug. The laptop ships with 100% free software and firmware, including the FSF's endorsed Trisquel GNU/Linux and Libreboot. One of the biggest challenges overcome in achieving FSF's Respects Your Freedom certification was the complete removal of Intel's ME and AMT firmware. The AMT is a controversial proprietary backdoor technology that allows remote access to a machine even when it is powered off. Quoting from the press release:

"The ME and its extension, AMT, are serious security issues on modern Intel hardware and one of the main obstacles preventing most Intel based systems from being liberated by users. On most systems, it is extremely difficult to remove, and nearly impossible to replace. Libreboot X200 is the first system where it has actually been removed, permanently," said Gluglug Founder and CEO, Francis Rowe.

Submission + - LibreOffice gets a streamlined makeover, native alternatives for major Microsoft (pcworld.com)

TechCurmudgeon writes: From PCWorld:
The Document foundation announced availability of the latest version of LibreOffice on Thursday, which it says is the most beautiful version of the open source productivity suite yet. LibreOffice 4.4 also fixes some compatibility issues with files that are saved in Microsoft's OOXML formats. LibreOffice 4.4 has got a lot of UX and design love," Jan "Kendy" Holesovsky, who leads the design team for Libreoffice, said in a statement.

LibreOffice 4.4 is currently available for Windows: https://www.libreoffice.org/do...

Comment The elephant in the room .. (Score 1) 203

@Anonymous: "How come such a relatively simple files - something that essentially plays media content - continues to be such a hot-bed of vulnerabilities. And not just bugs, but zero-day exploits too."

These are not vulnerabilities in Adobe's plug-in, these are defects in the underlying platform, the name of which must never be mentioned on slashdot.

Submission + - SciAm Fansubbers Score Hungarian Viral Hit (scientificamerican.com)

soDean writes: Editors at Scientific American noticed they were getting a TON of hits on the video, "What Happens to Your Body after You Die?”. To their surprise, the majority of the views were originating in Hungary.

Most Hungarians don’t speak English (fun fact: Latin was the nation’s official language into the mid-19th century. So, dice quod ad tuum Latin magister.) How were they enjoying our video? In their native language, via our crowd-sourced translation community on Amara! Köszönöm (thank you) to our Hungarian translators on Amara (especially to Sándor Nagy), and to all 1,064 of our translators on Amara who have translated 81 videos into 71 languages.


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